By Staff Writer
When we speak of America’s founding, we hear soaring rhetoric liberty, equality, and natural rights. But beneath those ideals lies a more sobering ledger: who paid for that revolution, and who profited.
The mythology of the American Revolution paints a nation united against tyranny. The reality was far more stratified. Poor white men tenant farmers, indentured servants, and tradesmen did the bleeding and dying, while wealthy merchants and landowners directed strategy and reaped the rewards. The infrastructure of sacrifice was built on their backs.
The Revolution wasn’t merely an uprising of the oppressed it was also a dispute among elites over economic control. Taxes imposed by Britain pinched wealthy colonial landowners and merchants far more than common farmers, yet the burden of payment and the bloodshed were ultimately transferred downward.
In most colonies, taxes funding the war effort were regressive: excise taxes, tariffs, and levies on commodities like salt and molasses fell heaviest on those least able to afford them. Inflation and scarcity hit the poor hardest, while plantation owners and urban speculators amassed wealth through war profiteering and land seizure.
George Washington himself the revered Father of the Nation died as one of the largest landowners in America, holding over 50,000 acres and hundreds of enslaved individuals. The revolution ended monarchy for the elite, but not economic hierarchy for the rest.
The Continental Army was largely composed of poor white men who enlisted out of desperation. Records show that a soldier’s monthly pay around $6 to $8 was often delayed or devalued by inflation. Many veterans returned to destitution, their promised land grants rescinded or stolen through legal trickery by speculators.
Meanwhile, political figures like Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton built financial empires in the chaos. Their wealth and power would lay the foundation for the United States’ first banking monopolies a system that continues to this day to funnel wealth upward, not downward.
Even as the founders invoked freedom and equality, slavery persisted, serving as the economic engine of the southern colonies and supplying raw goods to the northern merchants who loudly decried British tyranny. Women, Native Americans, and the landless remained disenfranchised heir voices excluded from the very documents claiming universal rights.
The pattern echoes throughout history, the rhetoric of liberation paired with the machinery of exploitation. The oppressed fight for ideals that their leaders redefine for material gain.
This imbalance isn’t merely an historical artifact it’s a recurring motif in human civilization. Every system of domination, whether colonialism, industrial exploitation, or modern financial imperialism, follows the same psychological and spiritual script.
Societies rise when a small class learns to manipulate the masses through abstractions of freedom, security, or progress. The true cost is paid in broken bodies, diminished spirits, and poisoned lands consequences externalized onto those without power.
And yet, resentment alone cannot liberate. When the poor, the exploited, and even the privileged lash out with hate or scapegoating, they replicate the same vibrational frequency that forged the problem. Evil doesn’t end by being destroyed; it ends by being transcended.
The only genuine revolution the one that cannot be hijacked begins within. Compassion is not weakness, it is the only energy that interrupts the ancient feedback loop of domination and revenge. A society animated by compassion exposes deceit because it no longer vibrates with fear.
Until human beings learn to integrate their own shadow the parts of ourselves that crave control, superiority, and vengeance we will continue to repeat the same historical cycle: the few ruling the many, under new slogans and flags.
As history shows, liberty without moral evolution is merely a shuffling of masters.
True freedom requires consciousness and the courage to act from it.
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